To Provost Sotiropoulos and President Rao:

We, the undersigned, demand that there be no reduction of faculty in the Department of Focused Inquiry (FI). FI faculty have been told that as many as 17 current employees, nearly one-third of our department, may need to be laid off in order to balance the budget. We reject the suggestion that layoffs are an acceptable way to balance our budget. Layoffs are bad for students and bad for faculty.

Layoffs Harm Students:

It is in the best interests of our students that VCU not layoff FI faculty in response to ongoing administrative budget mismanagement. As a state public university committed to quality instruction and student success in return for an increasingly expensive tuition, VCU has a responsibility to act for the benefit of students.

• FI faculty are essential to the mission of higher education at VCU; we teach foundational courses that build students’ communication skills, cultural and global competency, research skills, collaboration, and critical thinking, skills that are required of students throughout their time at VCU and in their professional lives beyond the university. Even though our faculty are teaching four sections of fully enrolled courses each semester, our Department already struggles to meet student demand for seats. Laying off FI Faculty will make it even harder for VCU to meet undergraduate students’ need for our courses.

• Our small, seminar-style classrooms enable VCU students to develop as thinkers and writers, and to find their footing at a massive university. Our program was created intentionally to foster cross-disciplinary inquiry and to ensure that our first- and second-year students are prepared to transition successfully into their disciplines. FI faculty work hard to regularly update our curriculum to support the University and students’ needs in response to current scholarship of teaching and learning. A threat to our faculty poses a threat to the intellectual mission of our University.

• Our faculty have made a demonstrable difference to student retention, especially among underrepresented minority students and Pell recipients. VCU’s federal status as a “minority-serving institution” is both a point of pride at VCU, as well as the key to our eligibility for a variety of grants under Title III in the Higher Education Act. However, “To remain competitive, we must continue to demonstrate institutional commitment and support for our minority students and support their success.” A threat to our faculty poses a threat to VCU’s stated mission of supporting our minority, low-income, and first-generation students.

• The small, personalized class settings in FI courses allow first- and second-year VCU students to find faculty mentors who will be consistently present through their college careers and to whom they can turn for advice about their academic and professional futures. This takes the form of recommendation letters, mentorship through the Undergraduate Teaching Assistant program, advice for future job and school applications, connections to community organizations and volunteer opportunities, and more.

Thus, in order to best support VCU students, employing and retaining our experienced, dedicated, and permanent full-time FI faculty is essential to meet our first- and second-year students’ needs.

Layoffs Harm Faculty and the Institution:

FI Faculty layoffs violate VCU’s commitment to create fair and equitable working conditions for FI faculty as individuals and disrupt VCU’s functioning as a whole:

• Laying off FI faculty will harm the University, specifically its general education curriculum. FI faculty have been pivotal in the creation of new curricula such as the racial literacy Foundations course, they have been leaders in the Provost’s call to explore new literacies, and they are critical to the running of the General Education Curriculum and Assessment Committees. FI faculty are experts in general education, and increasing their workload or reducing their workforce will make it harder for them to engage with the important work of the ConnectED program.

• Layoffs undermine DEI goals. In the past several years, FI has been working to prioritize the hiring of BIPOC faculty in order to better mirror and serve our student body and ourselves, and improve our low DEI scores in the VCU Organizational Culture and Climate Survey. Layoff policies targeting newer employees will remove these diverse faculty and make it correspondingly difficult to recruit future diverse faculty amidst a non-inclusive culture of precarity.

• Layoffs with no corresponding decrease in undergraduate admission would necessitate increased class sizes and workload. FI faculty already teach a higher load than faculty at peer institutions, as demonstrated in the National Council of Writing Program Administrators’ 2018 external review, which recommended reducing the load of all full-time FI faculty to a 3/3 load instead of the current 4/4 load. In addition, course caps in FI are already larger than the recommended 15 students per section, as advocated for by the National Council of Teachers of English. Layoffs would further increase the teaching burden on already overburdened faculty, or would require distributing the teaching load to part-time faculty, who cannot perform the teaching, mentorship, and service requirements, including both department and university service, that full-time faculty do.

• No clear policy for proceeding with faculty layoffs for reasons unrelated to workers’ job performance exists in the Focused Inquiry bylaws, the Faculty Handbook, or VCU’s HR policy. Faculty therefore have no way of ensuring they will be protected from arbitrary, personalized, or unethical layoffs. Miscommunication and lack of transparency about the future of our department and our collective personal and professional futures diminishes our ability to serve our students and the University.

Thus, in order to create productive and equitable working conditions, employing and retaining our experienced, dedicated, and permanent full-time FI faculty is essential to fulfill VCU’s mission as a Great Place.

The undersigned therefore demand that no FI faculty be laid off or fired in response to budgetary concerns.

**For the purposes of this document, the term layoffs includes: shifting contracts from renewable to nonrenewable; issuing terminal contracts; staff and/or workforce reduction; or in any other manner administratively reducing the number of FI faculty.